


Homecoming

by BleedingInk



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Case Fic, Case Fic Elements, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, Hunters & Hunting, Hurt/Comfort, The Bad Place, Wayward Daughters (Supernatural), Wayward Sisters, post episode: 15x12 Galaxy Brain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 18,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23632126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BleedingInk/pseuds/BleedingInk
Summary: Patience has a premonition about Kaia coming home. She and Alex must make sure that Claire is there to welcome her.
Relationships: Kaia Nieves/Claire Novak
Comments: 20
Kudos: 21





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shippers_Roost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shippers_Roost/gifts).



Alex stared at the cold, untouched pancakes on the table. She should have put them in the fridge half an hour ago, probably, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that just yet. She knew it was a foolish hope she was holding on to.

Jody had called just a few hours before to apologize for not coming home the night before and tell them she wouldn’t be back for a couple of days, at least.

“Something came up. I, uh… I’ll be a town for a couple of nights.”

“How far out of town?”

“I need to go to Kansas,” Jody had said.

“Kansas” meant the Winchesters. And the Winchesters meant trouble. After a couple of years hunting on and off and meeting other hunters, Alex had come to learn that Sam and Dean weren’t just ordinary hunters. Others dealt with a salt-and-burn ghost case every couple of weeks, maybe a bigger monster once a month. Sam and Dean were dealing with angels, archangels and world-ending threats every other day. Nobody had a seraph for a best friend, nobody else’s name stroke fear in the heart of demons. The closest the Sioux Falls crew came to something like that were dealing with the Lizard Monsters that jumped out of the interdimensional rifts that opened all over town at random.

That had been happening less and less in the past few months. They had a system: Patience had learned to tune in her abilities to the strange occurrences in town and could predict with a 90% accuracy when the next rift would appear and how many of the monsters would walk through. Jody, Alex and Claire then hunted down the thing and disposed of it before they could hurt anyone.

Alex had taken a few chances to dissect them, both to satisfy her scientific curiosity and to learn better ways to kill them. She knew all the weak spots in the scaly armor that covered their bodies, exactly how hot a fire had to be to melt it and what was the best way to confuse their night vision and fine sense of smell.

And lately, all that knowledge had been useless.

“There used to be new Lizards popping out every other day for like a year and a half. Now? We haven’t had a new rift opening for weeks!” Claire had pointed out. “Don’t you think it’s a little weird? Don’t you think maybe we should investigate what’s that about?”

“Absolutely not!” Jody had stated.

“Yeah, no news is good news in this case, as far as I’m concerned,” Patience had added.

Alex hadn’t said anything, but deep down, she was as intrigued out by the dwindling activity of the rifts as Claire was, though not for the same reasons. Alex wanted to learn a bit more about what kind of world these Lizards came from, if there were other creatures like them or even worse living just beyond the golden little lights that they could see floating in front of them. The biology major in her just craved to know, to understand. Her curiosity extended to other monsters as well: what was different about them? Was there just a mutation in their DNA’s that gave them those powers? How as it possible that angels and demons became one with a body when they possessed it, how did this incorporeal presence changed human physiology? How was it possible that ghosts left behind physical rests like ectoplasm, why could some do it and others couldn’t?

It wasn’t like Claire and Jody were bringing home monster cadavers for her to practice autopsies on them, so she really had no answer to all those questions. Not that she would’ve traded anyone’s life for her chance at finding out.

Claire’s concern with the rifts disappearing, however, had a more… emotional base.

“What if she gets away?” she’d asked, while pacing the living room up and down. “What if I can’t find her again?”

They all knew who she was talking about. The black cloaked figured, Kaia’s killer. More than any other monster in existence, more than any other thing that could possibly come out of the rifts, to her that was the worst and the thing she wanted to kill the most. Alex understood it, she really did, but she also understood Jody’s concern with her obsession towards it.

“You want to do what? Chase them into one of those rifts? Go back to the Bad Place? Get yourself kill in the same place Kaia was?”

Claire had crossed her arms over her chest, glaring Jody down in the way she did when she knew their adoptive mother was right. Claire was simply too proud to admit something like that out loud.

“These monsters… they’re just animals,” she’d replied. “They act like them, they hunt like them. They’re mindless. Kaia’s killer… she’s smart and she’s dangerous. We should be hunting her.”

The argument had gone on for an hour or two longer, while Patience and Alex slowly backed away from the living room.

“You really have no way of finding it?” Alex had asked in a whisper, even though they were far away enough that neither Jody no Claire could hear them.

Patience had shaken her head.

“I’ve been trying to get my sight to show me what I want it to show me, but it’s like riding a half-trained horse,” she’d explain. “Sometimes I can get it to do what I want, but others…”

Alex could tell she felt terrible at not being more helpful, even though in her opinion, she did plenty already. So she’d put a hand on Patience’s shoulder and smiled at her.

“Hey, it’s okay. It took your grandma years to get it to the point where she could see whatever she wanted, right? And she’d been practicing since she was a little girl. You’ll have time to get better.”

Patience had breathed out slowly, like she was relieved to hear those words. She’d opened her mouth to say something else, but they’d been interrupted by the roar of Claire’s truck backing out of the driveway.

“Where is she going?” she’d asked Jody when she came upstairs.

“Donna called yesterday,” Jody had told them. “She says she has a hunt that involves a woman in a black cloak near Yosemite.”

“Is it… _that_ woman in the black cloak?” Patience had asked.

“Why didn’t you tell her until now?” Alexis had wanted to know.

Jody had stared out of the window as Claire’s truck disappeared around the corner, with a very concerned expression.

“Because I knew she would run headfirst into it.”

Alex half-expected Claire to be back soon, but it had been three days and she was still gone. Donna had called them the day before to inform them they were moving further into the park and their reception was going to be shit (though, of course, Donna would never use that word), so there was no chance of contacting them. It made her nervous that, even with Donna’s back-up, Claire was going to do something stupid. She had been too pissed off when she left and her anger often took the better of her when it came to making smart decisions.

But Claire’s departure, as abrupt as it had been, hadn’t rattled her as much as Jody’s. She’d called to say she was checking out a cattle mutilation case, that there didn’t seem to be anything supernatural about it and she’d be home in a couple of hours for dinner.

A couple of hours had gone by. Alex and Patience had waited, eating in a very uncomfortable silence, watching Jody’s plate go cold.

“Are you sure you can check up on her?” Alex had asked.

“I’m sorry, I’m… I’m very tired,” Patience had replied, rubbing her temples. “It doesn’t really work well when I’m like this.”

Like Alex, Patience tried to lead a normal as possible life. In the last couple of years, she had finished her GED and enrolled in the community college. She took her exams as seriously as she took everything else, and for the past week she had been cramming like crazy. Especially because the anniversary of her mother’s death was coming up and her powers usually went a bit haywire when her emotions got the better of her. It was natural that she wanted to exhaust herself and occupy her mind with literally anything else, but Alex felt this was a terrible moment for that sort of thing.

Instead of pointing that out, Alex had said:

“It’s fine. Go to sleep, I’ll clean here.”

She’d done the dishes, put them away and cleaned the oven. She’d called a couple of people from the sheriff’s office to see if anyone knew where Jody had gone, but no one could give her a concrete answer. So finally, she’d gone to bed and she’d tried to sleep, but her concern for Jody (it was so unlike her not to call to let them know she was fine, what if she was in trouble? What kind of trouble? Could they help her? Maybe it was already too late…) hadn’t allowed her to. So ultimately, she’d got up in the middle of the night to read on possible creatures that mutilated cattle randomly.

Her phone had rung again near the crack of dawn.

“Jody, what the hell?” she’d screamed before she even said hello or good morning. “You scared the shit out of me, don’t ever do that again!”

“I’m sorry,” Jody had said after explaining she was currently leaving the state with Sam and Dean. “I’ll promise I’ll explain everything once I’m back.”

“Should I tell Claire and Donna? They should be back by now.”

“No!” Jody had replied, and there had been such urgency in her voice that Alex hadn’t dared to argue. After a few seconds, though, Jody talked with a calm that sounded fake: “No. They’re probably still busy with… whatever that thing was. I promise, me and the guys will handle this. You and Patience hold the fort for now.”

And well, there was no way that Alex could go back to sleep after that. So she’d got up and made pancakes. She didn’t feel particularly hungry, but she still made them. Years ago, after she, Claire and Jody had survived a vampire attack… with some injuries, but still. The day after, Claire and Alex had made pancakes for Jody. They’d made a complete mess in the kitchen and the pancakes had been burnt, but the smile on Jody’s face had been enough to make it worth it.

Ever since then, whenever Jody and Claire were out on a hunt, Alex made pancakes. She made them because she believed, foolishly, that if she kept doing it, it meant that they’d come back alive and mostly unharmed. It meant that her little family was still together, despite the distances and the danger. It meant that she didn’t have to spend another sleepless night waiting and praying for them to be okay.

Of course, it was only wishful thinking. Pancakes really had no power against the monsters and hostile forces that governed that universe and Jody and Claire were only human. Alex knew better than anyone how fragile the human body was. A monster probably didn’t even need to intend killing them. A snap here, a bad fall, an injury there… there was a million ways she could lose them. And yet, she knew it was futile to expect them to stop, so she bandaged their wounds and made food for them when they came home. That was the way she helped.

And most days were enough, but that particular morning, she had a bad feeling that made her want to do more.

Well, she really should have been more careful with what she wished for.

There was a clatter upstairs, followed by a scream by Patience. Alex put the plate of pancakes down and fled upstairs, calling Patience’s name.

Almost at the same time, the door of her room flew open and Patience stumbled outside, holding a hand to her head with a pained expression.

“Are you okay? What happened?” Alex asked, concerned.

“I sleepwalked into my bookshelf.”

“You did what…?”

“It doesn’t matter!” Patience said. She jumped towards and grabbed her by the shoulder. “We have to go. We have to go now.”

“Go… where? Patience! Stop!” Alex screamed.

Patience stopped at the end of the hallway. Her dark eyes were open wide, and she was still shaking slightly, like she was cold in her pajama bottoms and shirt despite the good weather outside.

“You have to tell me what’s wrong,” Alex insisted, walking closer to her. “What happened? Why were you sleepwalking? Did you see something?”

“I…” Patience took in a deep, shuddering breath and lowered her hand. The spot on her forehead where she’d hit herself against the bookshelf was red and swollen and Alex figured she needed to put some ice on it before it got worse. “Okay. Yes, I saw… there’s… there’s a lot going on. I’ll tell you all about it, but we’ve got to get on our way, or we won’t be there on time.”

“On time for what?”

“For rescuing Donna and Claire,” Patience said. “They’re in trouble and Claire can’t die. Not now.”

Alex felt her stomach twisting up in a cold, ugly knot. It wouldn’t be the first time Patience foresaw Claire’s death and she had been wrong about it.

But that had been two years ago when she wasn’t in full control of her powers. Now, her visions were definitely more accurate, though Alex detested to think about what the implications of that were.

However, after the initial wave of panic passed, Alex realized how weird the way Patience had phrased it was.

“What do you mean? Why can’t she die now?”

Patience took another second to breathe in deeply before saying:

“Because Kaia is coming home.”

* * *

Alex’s car was a piece of trash, a 1998 second hand Buick with a color that Claire defined as “red shit”. Alex didn’t particularly care. It did the job of taking her from the hospital to her home. When they needed to make a longer road trip for whatever reason, they took Claire’s truck or Jody’s car.

However, according to Patience, they didn’t have time to wait for Jody to get back and take them, so the Buick was going to have a baptism by fire that day. They filled out the tank in the first Gas ‘n’ Sip they passed through and took the highway to California.

Patience had more than enough time to explain what it was that she had dreamed about.

“So, I had three visions, back to back,” she told her. “One of them was Jody coming home with Kaia. Kaia came in through the door, took one look around and asked about Claire. You and I were there and we looked… we looked like we didn’t know what to tell her.”

“Okay,” Alex said, though she still had a billion questions, like how the hell was Kaia alive? Claire had said she saw the black-cloaked woman put a spear through her. They’d left her body on the other side of the rift because it was too risky to bring it over. She knew because she’d heard Claire saying a million times she wished she could’ve given Kaia a proper hunter’s funeral. “That still doesn’t mean the vision was indicating that Claire would die…”

“And then I saw Claire die,” Patience replied. “Her and Donna were in this place full of trees and grass and whatever and there was this… thing, stalking them through it.”

“Thing?”

“A figure in a black cloak. But it wasn’t human. It was too tall, and its hands…” Patience stopped as a shiver went through her. “Its hands were had this… ugly, long, skeletal fingers, with long claws in the end. It… it slashed Claire across the chest with them. She fell to the ground and the thing leaned over her and it was doing something… probably eating her.”

“Where was Donna?” Alex asked. Sometimes the visions upset Patience so much that she forgot important details. Maybe Claire wouldn’t be hurt by the thing, maybe Donna would come to her rescue…

“I don’t know. I didn’t see her,” Patience said. “I screamed and the vision ended. But this thing was dangerous, Alex, and if it kills Claire, if it hurts her…”

“Then what?”

Patience took a sip from the cup of coffee they bought at the gas station. It wasn’t the most hearty breakfast, but it was a long way to California and if Patience was right, then they had no time to lose.

“The third vision looked like it was… far into the future. A couple of weeks or months, something that’s not happening immediately, but still… Kaia was dreamwalking. She was looking for another universe, a universe where Claire was alive. She used a spell to open a rift, a complicated one with a lot of ingredients and words in Enochian. She stepped into another universe and then that place, it…”

“It what?”

“It… okay, this is hard to believe and also really weird, but bear with me.”

Alex had heard a bunch of ridiculous stuff in her life, from the lies her vampire family had fed her to the excuses Claire gave Jody when she was caught sneaking out of the house late at night, to some really lore on monsters she’d found when looking for something entirely different. She was convinced nothing Patience told her would surprise her.

She was wrong.

“That other universe where Kaia went looking for Claire, it… exploded.”

“It what now?”

“I have no other way of describing it,” Patience insisted. “It was a place full of storms with long plains covered in ash. Not a happy place at all. Kaia stepped on it and there was this loud sound and the earth opened up. Kaia fell in the rift and the rest of this world… it was like it was all falling apart.”

“But Kaia would have seen that,” Alex protested. “Before she tried to cross over to that other universe, she would’ve noticed how messed up and dangerous it was.”

“I don’t know why she didn’t see it,” Patience admitted. “I just know that she’s only going to cross there if she loses Claire. And that… it’s going to be bad, Alex. Bad things are happening on a scale we don’t really understand. They happened in that universe I saw and they could happen here.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean this is Winchester big.”

And really, she didn’t need to explain much more than that.

“Okay,” Alex accepted. “Okay. So, we save Claire…”

“And we can also save Kaia from going into that weird apocalyptic world,” Patience said, nodding. “We stay where we are and we wait for…”

Her voice trailed off. Alex waited for her to continue, but when it became apparent that she wasn’t going to, she urged her:

“For?”

“I don’t know.” Patience rubbed her temple. “I’ve had a headache for the last couple of days. It hasn’t been bad, but it’s like… things are rearranging, they’re changing massively. And you and I, we can’t really stop it. But we can do this for them. We can keep our family safe.”

That made a lot more sense to Alex than any of the other things Patience had said. They were on the edge of going over the speed limit, but Alex pressed on the pedal anyway.

If any of Patience’s visions had even as much as an inkling of truth, then they needed to hurry up.


	2. Chapter 2

“Can I at least get a beer?” Claire asked, huffing.

Donna gave her a side-eye.

“I would rather you have your mind clear for this,” she said, her Minnesota accent coming out strong, like it usually did when she was talking very seriously.

“Come on, it’ll help me sleep!” Claire insisted. “And I’ll definitely be sober tomorrow when we start the hike.”

Donna threw her a skeptical glare and Claire grinned back at her. She didn’t enjoy poking Donna as much as she did Jody, if only because Donna was infinitely more patient and also, more likely to treat her like an adult. Like right now: she opened the fridge’s door and picked up two cans to add to their already overflowing shopping basket.

“Fine, but only one and you drink it tonight with dinner,” she accepted.

The grocery store’s cashier was an old, bearded man that looked annoyed to have to put down his newspaper to help them out. He still forced out a smile.

“You ladies going into the park?” he asked them, disinterested.

“Ayup, we’re taking a long, beautiful camping trip here with my niece!” Donna said, putting an arm around Claire and pulling her in for a hug.

Claire made a noncommittal sound at that comment. She had wanted their cover to be two park rangers investigating some animal attack or something like that, but Donna had said she looked too young to be a range and that people were going to be less interested in a couple of women taking a family trip.

She had reluctantly agree, but that also had given Donna permission to hug her, ruffle her hair and call her “kiddo” when they were in front of people. In Claire’s opinion, she was enjoying that role way too much. On the other hand, she didn’t need to feign any reluctance or boredom, as she imagine any girl her age would have when spending the weekend hiking with her aunt.

In truth, Claire was itching to get into the woods. The black cloak figure hadn’t been the one she was looking for, but they had found some messed up things about it nonetheless and the sooner it died, the better for everyone.

“Well, you two be careful out there,” the old man recommended. “There’s a bunch of nasty things in that park I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.”

“We’re not afraid of wolves and bears,” Donna said, with her usual niceness.

The man gave them a cryptic look.

“Oh, bears and wolves aren’t the only thing out there. I could tell you some stories of people going missing in very strange circumstances…”

Claire wondered if that was a strategy to get people to hang at the store a little longer and maybe buy some extra gear. Either way, she leaned forwards and stared at the guy directly in the eye.

“That’s fine. We’re not scared of horror stories either.”

The man opened his mouth and closed it again, before turning to Donna like she expected her to reprimand Claire for her comment. Donna, however, simply smiled wider and slid her card over the counter.

“We’re paying with credit.”

The town could barely even be called that, really. It was more like a conglomerate of houses with dark windows despite not even being that late. It looked rather depressing and desolate, but people still stopped there because it was a thirty minute drive to Yosemite. Claire and Donna had been following their prey for a couple of towns now and thought they had a pretty good idea of where it was heading, but they still needed to stop and rest. The plan was to have dinner and a good night sleep so they could head into the woods in the morning fresh and ready to find the thing.

How they were going to kill it, well… that was another issue.

“Lore says that they’re only vulnerable when they’re feeding,” Claire said, opening the book she had left on the glove compartment before they went into the store. “But if it’s going into hibernation like we think, it means it won’t be feeing anymore.”

“That could be a bit of a problem,” Donna admitted, in one of her typical massive understatements. “But we’re going to figure it out, like we always do. We’re smart girls.”

She beamed at her with confidence.

Claire oscillated between finding Donna’s positive attitude endearing and jarring. She, herself, was a major pessimist, so she needed someone to remind her that not everything sucked all the time. Usually that was Alex’s job, because Patience suffered from some major anxiety all the time (a consequence of randomly being able to see the future worst case scenarios) and Jody… well, Jody had taken a maternal role towards her. Claire had vague memories of her mom and grandmother, but for what she knew, moms just worried all the time. It was kind of their job.

So whenever she was taking herself too seriously or getting too caught up in her head, it was Alex who normally pulled her from that funk by calling her out on her self-pitying bullshit. She kept her grounded and that helped her keep her head on what really matter: hunting monsters and finding Kaia’s killer.

Donna, on the other hand, seemed to understand Claire’s self-pitying a little bit better. Even with all her sunshine and smiles, even when she was constantly urging her to look at the bright side, she never got frustrated when Claire seemed unable to do so. And despite how her personality clashed with hers, Claire could definitely appreciate her for that.

It also didn’t hurt that Donna was a badass on her own right. For example, when they parked in the motel’s parking lot, she was the first one to notice something was wrong.

“Did we leave the lights on?”

Claire looked up to see that, indeed, there was a warm, golden glow shining through the cheap curtains of their room. However, that wasn’t even the most worrying thing.

“The door’s open,” she pointed out.

Even if they had left the lights on, they would never in a million years do that. There were some very important things in that room, like a whole arsenal of not entirely legal weapons, their computers, the books on lore they had brought with them and all the investigation regarding the thing they were hunting. Donna had locked the door when they left, Claire was absolutely sure, because neither of them was careless enough to risk someone finding out who they were and what they were doing.

Not to mention, being hunters, they had a few enemies that would take the chance to ambush them for sure.

Donna opened the glove compartment and handed Claire one of her guns. Claire quickly checked that it was charged and exited the truck holding it down, with her hand away from the trigger, the way Jody had taught her to hold it. They both moved as silently as they could and stopped at both sides of the door, listening attentively.

There was definitely someone inside, but Claire doubted it was an ambush. They were being way too noisy, moving around the room carelessly and speaking loud enough that they could hear their voices, even if they couldn’t make out what was being said. Claire exchanged a look with Donna. She pointed at herself indicating that she was going to go in first. Claire would’ve argue, but Donna stood up, kicked the door open and charge inside in the blink of an eye.

“Stop! Freeze!”

Claire ran after her, lifting the gun up as screams and the sound of someone falling over themselves received her. She pointed straight at the sound, almost expecting whatever that had been to jump at her, to attack her, ready to pull the trigger if she anything coming at her… but all she found was a girl on the floor, with her hands up and a terrified look in her face. A girl she knew very well.

“Patience?”

“Don’t shoot me, please!” Patience begged.

Claire looked over her shoulder. On the other side of the room, Alexis had pinned herself against the wall. She also had her hands up and was staring at Donna’s gun with apprehension.

“Girls!” Donna exclaimed. She put the safe of the gun back on and lowered it. “You scared the heck out of us!”

Claire also put her gun down, waiting for her heart to stop pounding as she extended a hand to help Patience get off the ground. She had a million questions going through her mind, so she decided to just pic one and start there.

“How did you find us?”

“Patience used a pendant her grandma gave her to do a dowsing session,” Alex explained. Claire noticed the way her legs trembled as she moved to sit down on one of the beds. “After we got here, well… there was only one motel in the entire town.”

“How you got in?” Donna asked, frowning.

“I… picked the lock,” Alex confessed.

“You don’t know how to pick locks,” Claire said, confused.

Alex crossed her arms over chest, defensively.

“You don’t know everything about me.”

“Why are you guys here?” Donna kept asking. Her eyes opened wide. “Is Jody…?”

“Jody’s fine,” Alex clarified quickly, even before Claire’s fear managed to settle with her. “She’s with Sam and Dean.”

Well, that had to be the opposite of fine.

“What, why? What happened?” Claire demanded to know.

“Well… Patience knows more about it than I do,” Alex replied

“It’s… it’s kind of a long story,” Patience said when they turned towards her. “And… you might want to sit down.”

What she said next made no sense.

Kaia’s death was branded with fire in Claire’s memory. She had seen the point of the lance coming through her side, the blood gushing out of that wound. She had seen the light going out of Kaia’s dark eyes, the way her hand had gone laxed on hers. The grief, the pain, the disappointment on herself that had weighted down on her for these past two years, it all came rushing back.

And it was then made ten times worse.

“No. You’re wrong.”

She hated that her voice came out broken like that. She hated that they all looked at her with a mixture of pity and caution. Like they were waiting for her to blow up.

Claire kept her hands tightly pressed together, waiting for them to stop shaking.

“I saw it, Claire,” Patience insisted.

“You’ve been wrong before.”

“I’m not about this,” Patience assured her.

“It’s the only thing that would make sense,” Alex agreed. “For Jody to leave so suddenly, for her not to give us details of what she was doing…”

“Precisely!” Claire said. She realized she had raised her voice and forced herself to take a deep breath before speaking again. “If it was really about bringing Kaia home, she would have told you! She would’ve told me!”

“Honey, I think we all know why she wouldn’t tell us something like that,” Donna intervened.

Claire’s entire body was shaking now, the anger becoming stronger now. She felt it everywhere: in the pit of her stomach, in the back of her head, heavy like a rock on her chest, on her lungs. She stood up and started pacing around the small motel room, but it did nothing to alleviate the tension setting into every one of her nerves.

“No,” she mumbled.

“If there’s a chance she can’t get Kaia back and she wanted to protect you…”

“No!” Claire shouted. The rage burnt through her, growing stronger the more she thought about the entire situation. Screaming didn’t make her feel any better, but she didn’t know what else she could do. “You’re telling me that Kaia… that she’s been alive all of this time? In that awful place, all alone?!”

She turned from them because she couldn’t handle their stares. She couldn’t handle the thought of Kaia, of how she’d let her down. If she had fought a little harder, if she had tried bringing her from the other side of the rift, if she…

She focused on her knuckles, going pale from how tight she was holding on to the side of the table. It was her legs now that were trembling. She resisted the urge to flip the table up, to throw things against the wall, to rip her own hair out.

None of that would really help Kaia.

“How?” she asked.

“How… what?”

“How are they going to bring her back?!” she asked. She was screaming again. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose, urging herself to calm a little at least, but she couldn’t help her emotions any more than she could stop her heart from pumping blood into her veins. She needed to collect herself, to get the hell out of that room. But at the same time, she needed to know. She couldn’t not know. “Like, what’s the plan? The rifts aren’t opening how they used to in Sioux Falls and once they go in there they won’t know where she is and…”

“That’s what Sam and Dean are for,” Donna pointed out. “They always come up with something, remember?”

If she was being honest, Claire had to admit that didn’t soothe her out at all. Yes, Sam and Dean were probably the best hunters in the country, if not the world, but the other side of that coin is that they were constantly threatened by something bigger than any of them. Castiel had (completely unprompted) told her some things and she had heard stories from other hunters that all indicated that none of them had any idea of the things that they had dealt with almost every day of their lives. And yes, they would never let anything happen to Jody, but at the same time… shit happened. It happened all the time.

What if Jody failed and they couldn’t bring Kaia back? Worse of all, what if something happened to her?

All those thoughts were going through her mind at a million miles per hour. None of them were useful for the current situation and she knew it, but she couldn’t help them.

Donna must have seen it in her face, because she immediately suggested a solution.

“Well, it’s pretty clear what we have to do now, isn’t it? You need to go back to Kansas. I would appreciate it if you would leave the truck, though, so I can drive to you when all of this is over,” she said, in her usual chirpy tone, like they were talking about a carpooling problem instead of monsters and resurrections. “I would love to say hi to Kaia again.”

As soon as she said it, though, the clouds in Claire’s mind parted. She knew exactly what she needed to do.

“No. I can’t leave.”

“Claire, this is Kaia we’re talking about,” Alex pointed.

“I know,” Claire said, through gritted teeth.

Did Alex really think that every fiber of her being wasn’t screaming at her to leave right now and go to Kansas? To participate in whatever it was that Jody and the Winchesters were trying to do just for the chance to make her mistake right? But at the same time…

“We’re hunting a Shtriga,” she said.

Patience and Alex’s blank expressions indicated they had no idea what she was talking about. So much for the researching leg of this operation.

“They’re Albanian specters that feed on people’s life force. They suck out your soul and make you progressively sick until you die.”

“And a nasty piece of work they are,” Donna added, with a sage nod. “They’re invulnerable to everything but pure iron, and that’s only if you happen to catch them feeding.”

“This one was haunting a halfway house for kids in the system, two towns from here,” Claire continued. “The kids… they’ve been disappearing for a couple of months as soon as they turn eighteen and no one was reporting them missing because, well, by then they weren’t the system’s problem anymore.”

“One of them happened to wake up in the middle of the night and saw the black cloak figure I told y’all about on the phone, right before one of his friends disappeared as well,” Donna explained. “So we looked into it and we figured the Shtriga was posing at the house’s director.”

“We also found out that she has a cabin in a privately-owned area near the park,” Claire continued. “She left unexpectedly when we came snooping around, so we figured she’s bringing the kids here or is planning to hide away from us.”

“Great, so… it’s seems like you cracked this one wide open,” Alex pointed out.

“If this thing is so dangerous, why don’t you come back later, with some back up?” Patience suggested.

“There’s a chance those kids she took are still alive,” Claire replied. “If we leave them, then we’re leaving them for them.”

“And according to the lore, Shtrigas have feeding cycles,” Donna continued. “If we lose this one here, the next time someone has a shot at killing it might be in twenty years or so.”

“And I’m not letting Donna go in there alone,” Claire declared. “I’m not leaving those kids.”

“Claire, what if Kaia…?” Patience started, but her argument died with a single look from her.

“I can’t abandon them. How could I look Kaia in the eye if I do? So…” She breathed in deeply and rubbed her eyes. She didn’t know when she had started crying, but she needed to stop right then. “I’m sure Jody and the guys have this handled. And if they don’t, we’ll handle it after we’re done here.”

Alex and Patience exchanged a look, almost like they were already expecting her to say precisely that. Donna stood up and put a hand on her shoulder, rubbing it softly as she spoke:

“I know this isn’t easy for you…”

“I guess we’re coming too then,” Alex said.

“What?”

Alex held Claire’s gaze, even raising her chin a little to show just how committed she was to her decision. Patience didn’t look nearly as confident as her, but she still added:

“Well, we might not be the greatest backup you get, but we’re here. We might as well.”

“Girls…” Donna began saying, but Alex interrupted her before she could get another word in.

“We’re coming with. And that’s it.”

Despite the despair Claire was experiencing, she couldn’t help but to smile. Even if the Winchesters couldn’t get Kaia back after this, she was certain she could do it.

 _They_ could do it.


	3. Chapter 3

Having Patience there turned out to be an advantage after all. Without her, they might have had to spend hours researching and trying to find the location of the Shtriga’s cabin. However, after a few moments of her holding a pendulum over a satellite map of the area, they had some very precise coordinates to follow.

They still have to leave Claire’s truck parked at the end of the road (it would just be too conspicuous to take through the wilderness), cut through an electrified fence and hike for hours through several miles of woods, all while holding duffle bags full of weapons and food and water that Donna insisted they couldn’t leave behind.

“You need your strength, girls,” she insisted. “And you can’t hunt dehydrated, that’s very important.”

Claire took another sip of the bottle and passed it along to Patience. She looked almost too tiny holding on to the shotgun they had handed to her. Jody and Donna had taught her how to shoot, so she wasn’t completely clueless around the weapon, but she certainly didn’t hold it with the expertise and ease that Donna had and that Claire tried hard to at least imitate.

“Hey, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

Claire opened her mouth, took a deep breath… and hesitated. Alex and Donna were a few steps ahead of them, looking around and holding their weapons up, attentive to every little sound of the nature that surrounded them. Perhaps she should be doing the same thing instead of worrying about stuff like this.

“Claire?” Patience insisted.

“It’s nothing. Let’s keep going.”

But Patience wasn’t about to let it go that easily. Sometimes Claire wish she and Alex weren’t so close, because Patience had picked up a lot of annoying habits from her. Like the fact they didn’t just accept it when someone was trying to change the subject.

“What is it? You can tell me.”

Claire kept walking in silence for a few minutes more, feeling Patience’s eyes boring into her the entire time.

“It’s… about Kaia.”

“Of course it is,” Patience said and Claire wanted to be a little annoyed at how not surprise she was about it, but she figured she had no one to blame by herself. She had been the one who had done absolutely nothing to hide her feelings for Kaia and how much losing her had affected her.

“Is she… I mean, you can see the future,” Claire said, stating something entirely too obvious in order to avoid her real questions for another moment. “Is Kaia…? When we meet again, is she… going to be mad at me?”

Patience made a really weird face. She flinched, like Claire’s question had somehow hurt her, like she needed to get physically away from her. It went away fast and Patience was once again showing her a neutral expression.

“Why would she be mad at you?”

“Seriously? Someone stranded you by yourself in a parallel world full of the Lizards and you wouldn’t be a little bit mad at them?”

Patience opened her mouth, maybe to protest, but she must have figured nothing she said would change Claire’s mind when it came to that.

“Look, I don’t even need my Sight to tell you that Kaia isn’t going to blame you for what happened, because there’s no one to blame for it, no matter what you’re thinking right now,” she said. “In any case, she can’t be mad at you any more than you could be mad at her.”

The enormity of what Patience was implying hit Claire with all the force of a freight train. Kaia’s passing, her absence, it had been weighing on her for two years and now… she couldn’t quite believe that it was happening, that he would finally get to see her again.

That if Jody and the Winchesters succeeded. And if they didn’t…?

“Did you hear that?” Donna asked.

Claire blinked and forced all the thoughts of seeing Kaia again to the back of her head.

“What thing?”

“Exactly,” Donna said. “No birds singing, no crickets, no squirrels running, nada. It’s too quiet around here.”

Now that she mentioned it…

Claire held her shotgun a little bit higher. The afternoon was falling, but they still had a couple good hours of light. Nowhere was it written that Shtrigas only hunted at night, but she would’ve preferred it if they could be out of there before sunset.

Alex checked the app on her phone.

“We’re close,” she announced, as if the eerily silent forest hadn’t been warning enough.

A few steps further into the trees, they saw the cabin finally, and it looked exactly like the lair of an evil soul-sucking specter: the façade was falling apart, showing the bricks inside of the wall. Well, at least the parts that weren’t covered by ivy and moss. The roof had several tiles missing and it was curved in a way that seemed to indicate that it was about to cave in. The small windows were dusty and dark, but the glass was miraculously intact and that was what killed the illusion that it was abandoned, even before they crossed the decrepit fence and wilted garden that surrounded it and saw the brand new chain and padlock on the door.

“Oh, yeah, that bitch’s definitely here,” Claire said.

Alex put her bag down and started rummaging through it. Claire had no idea what she was looking for, but it didn’t really matter. She closer, aim the butt of her shotgun to the pad and with three strong hits, she managed to break it off.

Things were going uncharacteristically well. She turned around to see that Alex had picked up a small brown satchel that Claire assumed contained her lock-picking tools.

“Or we can do that, I guess,” Alex said, rolling her eyes.

“It’s faster this way.” Claire shrugged.

Donna ignored the exchange and pushed the door open, holding her shotgun up.

“Take out the flashlights, girls,” she warned them after taking a few steps into the single open room that composed the entirety of the cabin.

She was right: the small, dirty windows barely let any sunlight in. but even under that poor illumination, they could see that the place was definitely not abandoned. There was a nice pulled out couch against one of the walls in front of a TV, even though there was no electricity, as they confirmed when Patience tried one of the light switches. The kitchen was orderly and filled with pans and pots, thought the thin layer of dust in them indicated they hadn’t been used probably since they had been bought.

“I mean, if you’re on a steady diet of delicious souls, I would think one wouldn’t really need to cook,” Claire pointed out.

“Yeah, that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?” Alex said. They all turned to look at her, confused at what she might mean. “Where exactly are the people she’s supposedly taking to eat?”

That was a more than fair point and Claire wasn’t sure how to reply. She was about to ask Patience if her pendulum had something to say about it when the beam of her flashlight found something very interesting right at her feet.

“That carpet looks new,” she said.

“So she has bad taste on top of being a monster,” Patience pointed out.

Claire didn’t even bother to tell her that insult sucked. Instead, she put her flashlight and gunshot down and grabbed a side of the couch to move it out of the way. It took a moment, but the others immediately figured out what she was trying to do and ran to help her. They rolled the carpet away and found exactly what she’d thought they would: a small trap door, with an iron ring to pull it open.

“Can she get any creepier?” Claire asked.

Donna pulled from the ring and opened the trap door, which fell on the floor with a loud thud. A set of spiraling stairs descended into a thick darkness awaiting them.

“Stay behind me,” Donna instructed before tentatively setting a foot on the first step.

Claire followed her, focusing on holding her weapon up, as she feared she would stumble down if she set a foot down blindly.

“Are you coming down?” she heard Alex asking behind her.

“You know what? I think three of you have it handled down there,” Patience replied. There was no way she could hide the nervousness on her voice. “I’m just going to stay here and scream if I see anything move.”

A second later, Alex footsteps came behind Claire. She was snickering to herself and thinking about how she was going to tease Patience later when Donna’s scream pulled her back into the horrifying reality.

“Oh, geez, oh, no!”

Claire practically jumped on the last few steps and moved her flashlight frantically. She found Donna leaning over what looked to be a metal hospital bed with (Claire’s hair stood on end) an unmoving figure resting beneath the sheets. She hurried towards her, each step revealing more and more details of what she was seeing.

The figure was shrunken and consumed, so thin it barely looked like a human anymore. There was a needle sank into the skeletal arm, connected to an IV drip that Claire deduced had been the only thing keeping it alive. There were cuffs around the poor girl’s wrists and ankles, but they were useless now. Donna had two finger pressing against her throat, but when she looked up at Claire, her eyes were glimmering with tears as she shook her head.

They were too late for her.

But maybe they weren’t to the kids in the three other beds next to her. He wasn’t in much better condition but Alex was already expertly searching for his pulse, her teeth gritted in concentration.

She didn’t have any luck. Neither did Claire when she moved to the third bed. The boy in this one looked a little better than the other two, like he hadn’t been there for so long and hadn’t been starved like them, but his skin was still cold when she touched him and his head lolled to the side lifelessly as she tried to find any sign of a pulse or breathing in his throat.

There was nothing, of course.

Claire felt like her guts and her lungs were on fire, as the rage boiled inside of her veins again. Rage against them, because they were too late, because they couldn’t save these kids. And rage against the monster that had no right to take these lives like these, to take them into this horrible, dirty basement and slowly drain them of their lives. She wondered how conscious they had been during that time, how aware that they were dying and there was no help coming for them, how desperate they had grown with the passing days…

“Donna!” Alex called from the fourth bed. “This one’s alive!”

The words sent a shot of adrenaline down Claire’s spine. She ran towards her, pointing the flashlight at the face pale resting on the pillow. His hair was dirty, his cheekbones looked sunken and his lips were cracked, but Claire recognized him. He was the last kid missing; the one whose friend had seen the cloaked figure.

“Ethan?” she called out.

Ethan’s eyes fluttered half-open. She wasn’t sure she could see them or hear them, but he let out a sound, a deep, slow moan of pain. It was the most amazing sound Claire had heard in a while.

“Okay. It’s going to be okay. Alex…”

Alex was way ahead of her: she had taken her lock-picking instruments and was already working on releasing Ethan’s hands and feet. Claire preferred to ignore the fact that her hands were trembling.

“It’s going to be okay. Ethan? Can you hear me?” Claire asked him, placing a hand on his cheek. “We’re going to get you out of here.”

While working on the cuffs, Alex started listing all the things that could be wrong with him.

“He’s probably dehydrated. How long has been missing? His legs could have muscle atrophy… be careful when you take the needle, he might bleed…”

“Okay. We got you, Ethan. We got you,” Donna said, putting one of Ethan’s arm around her neck and slowly helping him up. Ethan let out another moan of pain as Claire went around the bed to hold him from the other side.

“What’s going on?” Patience asked from upstairs, her beam of light coming down the steps.

“We found one of the vics alive!” Claire informed her. “Stay where you are!”

The ascent was slow and tortuous. Claire wasn’t sure how aware Ethan was of what was going on, because at times it looked like he was trying to find his footing and at times, he went limp in their arms and he probably would’ve fallen if she and Donna hadn’t been supporting his weight. He wheeze instead of breathing, and his heart seemed like it was at the edge of failing.

Still, they managed to get him all the way up and sat him on the couch. He coughed a couple of times and then stared at them with wide, sunken eyes, full of fear and doubt. Like he didn’t really believe this was happening or like he wasn’t sure what they were there to do.

“Wa…” he started, but got interrupted by a fit of dry coughing that took a long time to recede. “Water.”

Patience hurried to pick a bottle from their bag and handed it to him.

The sensation of triumph at having found him alive vanished in a second while Claire looked outside of the window. The night had fallen on the woods and they had a long trek back to the truck. A trek Ethan was in no condition to make.

“Take small sips,” Alex said. “It’s going to be okay.”

“Ethan?” Donna called him, kneeling in front of him. “Listen, my name is Donna. Your friend Johnny told us about you.”

“Jo… Johnny?” Ethan asked, narrowing his eyes. He closed them very tightly and opened them again. He still looked like he was on the edge of passing out, so Claire was sure they weren’t going to get a lot of answers to him.

“Does it come every night?” she still asked him. “The thing that took you?”

Ethan looked at her and then let out the closest thing he could to a scream. It sounded hoarse and low, but the terror in it was still more than palpable.

“It’s okay!” Donna assured him. “It’s okay! We’re here to save you. You’re not alone anymore.”

Alex threw her a glare, but Claire had just got the answer she needed to decide their next course of action.

“We have to get the truck here.”

“That could take hours. You could get lost in the dark,” Patience pointed out.

“Well, I’ll move faster than him, in any case,” Claire said, with a shrug. Before any of them could stop her, she grabbed one of the duffle bags and her shotgun.

“Claire, if you find that thing out there…” Donna tried to argue.

“And if it finds us here, then it’ll have a nice buffet of souls to feed from,” Claire replied.

She could see them scrambling to find another argument, but she already knew she wasn’t going to listen to them. They had made a mistake. They should’ve been less worried about stealth and more about how to make a quick getaway. But none of them expected to find anyone but the Shtriga itself there.

Well, they had to pay for that now.

“Claire!” Donna called her, but Claire had already opened the door and sprinted out into the night, heading into what she calculated was the general direction of the road.

She hoped she was right. They had very little time to waste.

As her breathing became shallower and as her feet became slower jumping over roots and tall grass, however, another thought crossed her mind.

She should have left a message for Kaia with the others.


	4. Chapter 4

According to her cellphone, Claire had been running for thirty minutes and she was still too far from the road when she ran out of water. She had been taking sips, alternating between running and trotting for as long as her legs could carry her, only stopping to make sure she was heading in the right direction. Despite what Alex must have been thinking of her right then, she wasn’t a complete idiot. She knew getting lost in a moment like this would be outright disastrous.

Another disastrous thing would be for her cellphone, which she was using as a compass, to run out of battery. Well, what could she do? It wasn’t like the Shtriga had a place where to plug it in her creepy ass cabin. If she was left alone in the dark, the only thing she could do was keep on going and pray that she would eventually find the road.

In moments like these, Claire tended to curse her own pride and stupidity. Jody had tried taking them camping just for the hell of it and teach them how to orient themselves in the South Dakota wilderness following the stars and whatnot. Both Alex and Claire had been not super on board with the plan of spending an entire weekend sleeping on the floor and peeing on the bushes, so at least this hadn’t been a case of Alex doing the smart, sensible thing and learning something that would come in handy in the future and Claire feeling like an idiot later on. They both had dropped the ball on this particular instance. She made a mental note of gloating about it when she saw her again.

Because she was going to see her again. And Patience. And Donna. And Jody.

And Kaia. She was going to see Kaia again.

The thought was enough to make her regain strength, to keep going even when she thought her heart was about to jump out of her chest or when there was no more oxygen in her lungs. She had to focus on that. She didn’t have time to regret or doubt her decision. She was going to save Ethan, she was going to kill the Shtriga so it wouldn’t kill anyone else ever again.

And then she was going home to South Dakota, and she was going to see Kaia again. She was going to tell her everything that had gone through her mind in those last two years, she was going to beg her to forgive her for leaving her in the Bad Place and not finding the thing that killed her sooner.

She had dreamed about this for so long. She had dreamed about Kaia for so long…

She started running again, picking up speed and trying to focus her eyes on the roots and rocks ahead of her so she wouldn’t trip on any of them. She just had to keep on going, find the truck, turn it back around and get everyone in the cabin. It almost started sounding like a mantra the more she repeated it: get the truck, get back, get everyone one. Find the Shtriga, kill it.

Go home. Go home to Kaia.

The duffle bag was heavy on her shoulder. The strap sank on her with flesh and it hit painfully against her thigh with every step she took. She finally gave herself permission to stop, put it down and went through it. Since she had run out of water, the only important things there were some knives, a machete and an extra round of iron bullets. She took those and left the rest behind. Her Grigori sword was in another bag that she had left at the cabin with her friends. They would make good use of it if it was necessary. Claire wasn’t sure it would kill a Shtriga, but she had tried it against several different kind of monsters since getting it and she had been please to discover it was useful against most anything.

They would be fine. They were strong and they were together. She just needed to get to the truck so they could get the hell out of there.

She had just started running again and repeating her mantra once more ( _go home, see Kaia_ ) when she suddenly stopped. Her heart was beating so hard and there was a pain in her side. Her body was covered in sweat, her mouth was dry and she was struggling to get oxygen into her lungs, but none of that was the reason she stopped.

No, it was because of the sudden silence. She had heard a cricket in the distance, but that had been a while ago. There had been an owl hooting at one point. Normal sounds of the wilderness at night.

Now, however, it had been a while since she had heard anything but the rustle of her boots on the ground. The blood in her ears was rushing. She forced herself to take in deep, slow breaths and checked her cellphone. The screen remained black no matter how much she pressed the on button. She cursed to herself and slid it back into her pocket, holding up the flashlight and the shotgun.

The woods around were eerily silent. She had no idea how far away she was from the truck and she had no way to call for backup.

So she had to move carefully now, if the Shtriga was close.

Save Ethan. Save her friends. Go home to Kaia.

Her first steps forwards were hesitant, her ears patiently trying to pick up on everything around her, anything that wasn’t her own agitated breathing and heartbeat. She didn’t try to be stealth. There was really no point to it. If she could hear herself, a soul-sucking creature of the night certainly could to.

It had to be close. It had to be coming. Every hair on Claire’s arm was now standing and her skin was full of goosebumps. But her hands weren’tr trembling and her finger was firm on the trigger.

The darkness around her moved. It shifted, like the night was a cloak and it had suddenly been pulled. Claire turned towards the movement, but all she could see were the unmoving trees that had been there before.

The thing was close and it was hunting her. Would it be like other monsters that toyed with their victims before eating them? If so, that was exactly what she needed. Claire was a very smart little mouse and the mistake all the other monsters had made had been toying with her.

Because as long as she drew breath, she was never going to stop fighting these shadows.

“Come on,” she whispered. Her voice came broken and raspy from her dry throat. “Come on, bitch.”

She didn’t stop moving, she didn’t stop walking. Each step took her closer to the truck, each single moment…

The branches to her right moved and Claire turned the flashlight towards them. She didn’t have time to pull the trigger before the thing was on her.

It was barely a creature, barely resembled a human. Its dark cloak flapped on the night wind as it descended upon Claire, its face was dry and contorted. She could barely make anything out of it except for a mouth, wide and round, searching for her.

She hit the ground as the Shtriga loomed over her. Claire knew it was useless, but she suddenly wished she hadn’t left all her weapons behind. She took a shot blindly and she had no way of knowing if it had hit it or not.

It did anger it, though. It let out something that sounded like a high-pitched scream and raised its hand. Under the moonlight, its creased skin looked grey and healthy and its fingers extended up like twisted claws.

Claire raised the shotgun again, but the claw reached her right across the forearm. She barely had time to register the pain when the other hand slashed her chest, ripping her clothes and breaking her skin.

She screamed. Her blood came gushing out of her wounds, soaking the dead leaves underneath it.

Another slash, this time in her stomach, deeper and angrier. She hadn’t expected those claws to be able to dig so deep, but they hurt her enough that her brain could only focus on that and not on the fact that Shtriga was pinning her down on the ground with one of those horrible hands. She saw its face descending upon her, its black, hungry eyes.

And she decided she was not going to die there.

She couldn’t.

Not without seeing Kaia again.

The Shtriga’s face came closer to her mouth, almost like it intended to kiss her. The pain ripped through her body, like her organs were melting, like her skin was being taken apart. There was a scream echoing in her ears and it took Claire a second to understand it was coming from her own throat. The Shtriga stood back a little, tilting its head at her like it couldn’t understand why she was screaming and squirming for.

The bitch was doing it. It was trying to feed on her, to suck out her life force. But it apparently couldn’t do it all at once. Maybe it was too full from the souls it had already eaten or maybe it was just that she needed time to assimilate it all. It didn’t matter. Claire took stock of it.

She thought she was ready for the second time the Shtriga moved closer, but the pain was just as bad this time. Her sight was going completely black for moments, like her mind was ready to give out entirely. And maybe it was too much. Her muscles weighted a ton, every inch of her body was screaming in unison with her. Her instincts were kicking in, the instincts that told her she just needed to stop suffering. The fastest way to do that was to give in, to let the darkness at the edge of her mind overtake her. She wouldn’t have to see the Shtriga’s face coming closer, she wouldn’t have to feel how her life was forced out of her breath by breath.

But she couldn’t do that.

Her hand closed around the shotgun, gripping it tightly, focusing on the way the metal pressed against her skin. Moving felt like an impossible task, but Claire pushed herself, inch by inch. Every tendon, every muscle, every bone pulling he rback, but she fought against it. She fought against the nausea and the pain.

The Shtriga moved back and then leaned in once more…

The moment the pain started again, Claire pulled the trigger.

The shot felt like an explosion that reverberated inside of her brain, followed by the shriek of the specter. Her weight wasn’t on her anymore, so Claire dragged herself away, ignoring the way the wound on her side sent a shock of needles and barbwire around her middle. She managed to position her back against the nearest tree.

The black cloak figure thrashed and screeched on the floor, its hands trying to reach out into its own chest like it wanted to pull the bullet out of there.

Claire wasn’t about to allow that, of course. She aimed the shotgun.

“Eat iron, you ugly ass Dementor,” she muttered as she pulled the trigger again. And again. And again. The figure on the floor continued to move and shriek, but after she was out of rounds, Claire realized it wasn’t making any more sounds.

It just laid there, silent and shriveled. Claire stretched her hand, not really intending to touch her. She pulled it’s hood away and almost wanted to laugh. The face that was underneath it had a human appearance. She and Donna had been right. The thing had been masquerading as the halfway house’s director all along.

“Bitch,” she said, but she found no consolation in the insult. She hated it. She hated that she had used her position, that she had gained the trust of those kids in her care and that she had done to them what she had seen in the basement of that cabin. If she could kill it again, she could.

But it was done now. It wasn’t going to hurt anyone else, ever again.

The anger extinguished itself like a fire that had been stomped down. And after it was gone, after all it was left were embers, the pain and the numbness overtook her again. She was so tired. And damn, there was so much blood. Just looking at it in the faint light of the flashlight made her slightly dizzy. She had no idea there was so much blood inside of her. And it didn’t seem to be stopping.

She closed her eyes. She hoped… she knew that Alex and Patience would tell Kaia that she was sorry she couldn’t be there. Would she understand? Would she cared that Claire had died like this? Would she be mad?

She thought about when she saw Kaia for the first time. She looked so fragile and so scared in that hospital bed, her dark curls in disarray and her eyes wide with fear. She had looked like a little scared animal, but the moment she had stood up and tried to make her escape, Claire had known she was the type of animal that was willing to chew its own leg to escape a trap. And she had understood her entirely.

It was no wonder she had survived in the Bad Place alone for two years. Claire wished she could tell her she was proud of her, that she was so strong and so brave that she…

Her face fell down, her chin hitting against her chest. It hurt to even think. She just wanted to drift away, to sleep. She was so cold. She had been on the brink of death before, when the Winchesters had given her the anti-lycanthropy medicine, but then it had been hot, it had been like a fire was burning her from the inside out. This felt like all the warmth was just abandoning her body and she was simply… sinking into that darkness…

There were voices calling her name, but they sounded so distant and she didn’t have the energy to answer to them. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone? She just wanted to sleep, she wanted to…

Someone grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her. It hurt less than when the Shtriga did it, but the shock was still enough to jolt her awake. There were golden lights and shadows moving around her. It took her a second to realize that she knew these people, she knew their voices and why they’d come looking for her.

Alex was kneeling in front of her, pressing something into the stomach of her wounds.

“Claire. You’re not going to die,” she said. It sounded more like an order than encouraging words. “Do you hear me? We’re going to get you out of here and you’re not going to die!”

“What do I do?” another voice asked. Patience. Claire caught a glimpse of the chain wrapped in her hand and she would’ve laughed about them dowsing her if it wasn’t because of everything that was suddenly hurting again.

She didn’t think she cried, but she must have made some sort of sound, because Patience and Alex were on her again.

“Put pressure on the wound. We have to stop the bleeding before we move her,” Alex said. Her fingers were going up and down Claire’s abdomen and chest, as if she was trying to figure out in there were any more wounds. The distinctive sound of clothes being torn reached Claire’s ears and then the cold air of the night touched her skin, making her shiver even more. “Shit, her shoulder’s dislocated.”

She hadn’t even felt that. It must have happened when the Shtriga had pinned her to the ground. It was kind of funny that she hadn’t even noticed it and she thought about saying it, but her mouth was still too dry, with her tongue stuck to her palate.

Someone put a bottle in front of her lips.

“Drink,” Alex ordered her. “Claire, come on! You’ve lost a lot of blood, you’re dehydrated. You have to drink some water.”

Even opening her lips was a monumental effort, but Claire forced herself to. It hurt to swallow, but after the water slid down her throat, it was almost like she could feel a sparkle, something awakening inside of her again.

“Donna’s on her way with the truck and Ethan,” Alex told her. “I promise, it’s going to be alright. Claire, do you hear me? You cannot die!”

“Why not?” Claire asked. She wasn’t sure if she did it out loud or not or why she that. She was simply too tired and in too much pain to even think about surviving this.

Alex grabbed her by her cheeks and forced her to look up. Her face was blurry, but Claire could tell that she was mad.

“Jody will never forgive you,” she said. “And you have to see Kaia again.”

Those were some very strong points, and perhaps the only ones that could break through the fog in Claire’s brain. She breathed in and this time she swallow more when Alex put the bottle against her lips.

Alex and Patience kept fussing over her, talking about this or the other. Claire tried to follow the thread of their conversation, but it was like her brain refused to understand more than a couple of words at a time. Alex was throwing around fancy medical words to describe what was happening to her and insisting she needed to take in fluids (she actually used that word and Claire would’ve laughed if she hadn’t been so out of it) while Patience kept half-singing, half-talking about whatever bullshit went through her mind.

Claire couldn’t be sure how long it was, but after a while, they heard the roar of an engine coming closer. Claire managed to open her eyes enough to be blinded by the high lights. She moaned and closed them again, already imagining what came next.

“Claire, I’m gonna need you to stand up,” Alex said, talking to her softly like she was a child. “Can you do that? Please, you need to do that.”

“Alright, alright,” Claire slurred. “You gonna let me sleep afterwards?”

Alex didn’t answer or the question didn’t register to her as she threw one of Claire’s arms around her neck while Patience did the same with the other.

“One, two, three…”

Claire’s feet bent and she almost stumbled as they raised her up. She tried to put them on the ground and take some steps, but she was too weak to actually do that, so all she could do was let the others drag her. She thought she heard Donna’s voice, but she couldn’t make up what she said. She couldn’t even open her eyes by that point.

Then she was laying down on her back somewhere soft and there was more pressure applied on her side. Warm hands holding hers, telling her to hold on.

Claire tried, she really did. But at that point her brain simply gave up and she sank herself into the darkness waiting for her at the edge of her consciousness.


	5. Chapter 5

Kaia woke up screaming.

Her heart was almost jumping out of her chest and her hands were grasping at the sheets so hard her knuckles had paled.

Sheets. Sheets on a bed. A bed in a room, with walls and a ceiling.

Kaia looked around, closed her eyes and then opened them again. When she could force her hands to move again, she counted her fingers. That was always a good way to tell if she was dreaming or not: she always had eleven or nine fingers in her dreams.

She had ten. All ten of them. She was awake. She was home.

She forced herself to breath in, deep and slow, over and over again in an attempt to calm her heart down.

The familiar lyrics of Mary Mack came to her lips before she even realized that she was singing it.

_… all dress in black, black, black_

_With silver buttons, buttons, buttons_

_All down her back, back, back…_

By the time she had repeated three times, her breathing had calmed down and her heartbeat wasn’t as quick as before.

And she managed to get herself together right on time, because a second later, Jody opened the door carrying two plastic cups and a paper bag.

“Hey,” she greeted her. “Brought you breakfast. Donuts. There wasn’t much of a selection at the bakery, but I still got you one of each.”

Kaia forced herself to smile at her, but as she was doing it, she realized that she wasn’t forcing it at all. Donuts sounded like the most amazing food in the world, after two years surviving on leaves, lizard meats and the rare berry that she was only half-sure wasn’t poisonous for her.

They tasted like freaking Heaven. She wolfed down three of them in the time it took Jody to get through one.

“Thank you so much,” she said after downing the coffee in a single swallow.

“You’re… very welcome,” she seemed. Kaia realized she was taken aback by her hunger. She felt her cheeks burning with a bit of embarrassment, but then again, Jody said absolutely nothing about it and quickly changed the topic: “So, are you excited to see Claire? We should be there around noon.”

Kaia had been excited to see Claire the moment they had taken a step inside of Jody’s home. In fact, she had been so excited that at first she didn’t realize there was anything wrong until she saw Jody’s face falling.

“Huh,” she muttered.

“Is there something wrong?” Kaia had asked, nervousness growing in her stomach.

Jody had deflected the question masterfully by saying:

“I need to make some calls.”

Kaia had sat down on the couch while Jody did that. She could hear pieces of the conversation: talking to the hospital where Alex worked (“She changed all her shifts? Are you sure?”) and to some friends of Patience from college (“She didn’t go to study with you? Oh, okay. If you hear anything from her, could you please call me?”). The relief of being back and being safe and the excitement to see Claire were slowly being eaten away but a far less pleasant feeling.

Doubts.

What if Claire didn’t care that she was back? While she was in the Bad Place, she had thought about her a lot. She had even shown up in her dreams, sometimes, when she wasn’t seeing through the eyes of the Other Kaia. Claire had been so kind to her, she had been so patient. She had made her feel cared for and listened to for the first time in a very, very long time, after what had to be the worst in a succession of really bad days.

Other times, however…

She didn’t blame her for leaving her there. She had been unconscious and so sure she was dying even she had been surprised when she woke up, alive and alone in her worst nightmare. It had taken a while to convince herself she was alive, but the hunger in her stomach and the heaviness in her feet were too physical a sensation to deny them.

She could have come through, too, sometimes. She had seen the rifts opening, she had seen the Lizards jumping towards them at every chance, but she had been too scared to follow them through the cracks. She feared that the Lizards would come for her if she made her presence known by following them. It wouldn’t be the first time they would literally chase her up a tree. She had discovered in time that they were really bad climbers and it was easier to fight them if she had the high ground, but she wasn’t sure she could outrun them towards a rift.

And worst of all, what if those rifts didn’t lead back home? What if they went somewhere worse, like the apocalyptic dying world that Jack had shown her?

A part of her hoped that one day maybe she could find a way home, but another part acted like this was it. She was going to die in this place for real and all the little routines she performed (finding water, finding food, finding a way to hide from the monsters) were only prolonging the inevitable. There was no one coming to rescue her. Even if it was, the Other Kaia had taken her place back in her world. She wouldn’t just let her trade places with her without a fight.

In those days when pessimism invaded her, it had been easy to let the doubts creep in. The same doubts that had invaded her as she sat in Jody’s living room and heard her desperately trying to locate the other girls.

What if she had overestimated her importance to Claire? They had shared one day together and Claire had been trying to get her friends back. Kaia was their only witness and clue, so of course she had acted nice with her. Even when she had felt she could talk to her like no one else in her life, that Claire understood her on a level that no one else did, maybe she had just imagined that. Maybe she had craved affection of any kind so badly that she had confused many of the things she had felt and that she thought Claire had felt in return.

She had resigned herself to dying without ever knowing the answer. But now that her doubts could be answer, she was growing increasingly more anxious with every moment that passed.

“It isn’t like them to just disappear like this,” Jody had insisted, pacing up and down the place.

“Do you think maybe they’re in trouble?” Kaia had asked.

Jody had stopped and taken in a deep breath. The worry in her eyes hadn’t disappeared, even as she forced herself to smile at her.

“It’s okay, honey, I’m sure I’ll find them soon enough,” she’d assured Kaia. “Why don’t you go to sleep? You must be tired.”

Kaia wasn’t sure she could sleep, not with how worried she was, but she’d greatly underestimated the power of an actual comfortable bed after two years of sleeping on a leaves mattress. At first, she had sunken in a comfortable, cool darkness, a dreamless sleep that she greatly needed. But after a while, the darkness opened up. She realized she had been floating on an endless, stormy sky. The blackness were angry clouds, charged with thunder and lightning. She was freefalling through them, spiraling in the thin air, with the wind blowing through her hair and her clothes. The ground underneath rose to meet her…

She’d woken up breathing heavily, with her heart thumping and for a second she had been disoriented. Until she’d heard Jody’s voice:

“What do you mean there was an accident? What kind of accident?” she was asking. Her tone was high-pitch, panicky. “Is she okay? Is she _alive_?”

Kaia had known right away that she was talking about Claire. Or maybe her mind had gone through her because she was in her room and she had been aching to see her since the moment she’d stepped back into this world. She wouldn’t feel like she’d really come back home until she could see her face again.

“Okay. Okay. I’m on my way,” Jody had said.

Kaia had kicked the sheets aside and started looking for the clothes that Jack had given her. They were big, but comfortable and she couldn’t really care about style in a moment like that. She had finished dressing up by the time Jody walked into the room.

“Kaia, I need to…” she’d started saying, but stopped when she’d noticed her getting ready.

“I’m coming with you,” Kaia had said before Jody could add another word.

She’d hesitated.

“Are you sure? It’s a two days drive. Maybe we should…”

“I’m coming with you,” Kaia had repeated. She didn’t mean to sound forceful or like she was going to throw a tantrum, but there was no way she was going to stay behind if Claire was hurt. “Please, Jody,” she’d added, in a softer tone.

Jody had given her a strange look, a look of something akin to fear and compassion. She’d probably wanted to insist that Kaia should stay, but instead she’d said:

“Okay.”

So there they were now, on day three of the two days drive. Technically, they could have made it to the town were Claire had been hospitalized, but they were still four hours away and Jody was falling asleep at the wheel. Kaia could see her eyes fluttering shut and the way she shook her head trying to stay awake. She wished she could drive so Jody could take a nap in the backseat while they kept moving, but all she could do was insist they stopped at the next roadside motel they saw.

“Claire will understand,” she’d told Jody. “You need to rest.”

Jody had looked at her with bloodshot and exhausted eyes.

“Are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

Kaia had assured her she would. She had dreamed of the storm gathering every single night now, and she wasn’t sure what it meant, but her dreams had always terrified her. This was nothing new. But she hadn’t come this far to get both her and Jody killed in a car accident because Jody literally couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore.

Jody probably had slept even less than her, if the way she was chugging coffee that morning was anything to go by. But she seemed a lot more animated as she informed Kaia she had talked with Donna.

“She says Claire is doing okay. Her wounds have healed, though she’s sleeping a lot from the concussion. However, doctors think she could get out of the hospital today and we could take her home.”

“That’s great,” Kaia said, holding unto her plastic cup with a little more force than necessary. That was great, it was what she wanted: for Claire to be okay, for her to be healthy and safe.

But Kaia had been so focused on getting to her, on checking that she was doing well, that she hadn’t realized that now she would have to actually talk to her. What would she say? How could she explain…?

“Kaia.” Jody stretched her hand over the table and put her hand on Kaia’s wrist. “It’s going to be okay. Claire… she’s missed you a lot, you know?”

“Did she?” Kaia asked, surprised.

“You wouldn’t believe how much,” Jody assured her. “Come on, we should get going if we want to be there before lunch.”

There wasn’t much to pack. Kaia literally had just one change of clothes that they had bought in one of the gas station between Lebanon and Sioux Falls. She looked even scrawnier and smaller than she did in Jack’s clothes, but at least they were clean. She spent at least two minutes looking in the mirror, trying to untangle her curls. There was really nothing she could do for her ashen face and the circles under her eyes. She had lost weight in the Bad Place, so her cheekbones were sharper and sunken.

She tried to convince herself that appearance wasn’t the most important thing, that Claire would understand and that she wouldn’t exactly look like a model either after being almost killed and spending three days at the hospital. She almost succeeded.

Jody tried to keep a conversation going during the trip and Kaia tried to answer to her, but she really didn’t want to talk. She felt sick to her stomach a little and all she could really do was look out of the window and keep her vomit down. Finally, Jody just turned on the radio and they rode the rest of the way with random pop songs.

It was so weird to listen to music again. Kaia made a mental note to ask Claire what kind of music she listened to those days.

They saw Alex first when they walked in on the hospital. She was snoozing on a chair in the hallway but started awake as soon as Jody called her name. She came running up to them and threw her arms around her mother.

“I’m really sorry we worried you,” she said, immediately. “Patience said it was an emergency and we couldn’t just…”

“It’s fine,” Jody said. She seemed a lot more relaxed that she had since they’d arrived at Sioux Falls to an empty house. “It’s… as long as you’re all okay.”

Alex nodded and her bright grey eyes turned towards Kaia. She shrunk a little.

“Uh… hi, I’m…” she started to say, not sure what the next words was going to be. _‘I’m Kaia, I don’t know if you remember me’. ‘I’m back’. ‘I’m so glad you were there for Claire’_.

She didn’t have to say any of those things. Alex took a step towards her and gave her a tight hug, like she couldn’t believe either that she was there too.

“How are you?” she asked, when she stepped back.

“Uh, I’m still… a little confused,” Kaia admitted. “But I think I’m going to… I think I’m gonna be fine.”

Alex nodded.

“That’s good. That’s perfect.”

There was a long pause, like neither of them knew what to say next.

“Do you want to come in to see her?” Alex offered in the end. “She’s still sleepy, but I’m sure she’d be glad to see you when you wake up.”

Kaia breathed in deeply. Suddenly, her hands were trembling and her feet felt like lead as she followed Alex down the hallways. Why was she so nervous? Everyone had told her Claire would be glad to see her, why was she so on edge?

Maybe because she still had trouble wrapping her head around the fact that someone had missed her. And even more so that that person had been Claire.

The window pane of her room were open. She stopped for a second to peep inside: Claire was laying on the bed, her long blonde hair forming a halo around her round face. Her chest rose up and down slowly, with every deep breath she took, under the white sheet of the bed. She had an IV drip coming into her arm, and the other one was propped up in a cast, but other than that, she could have just been as easily asleep in her own room. No cannula in her nose, no machines monitoring her vitals.

That was good. It meant she was mostly okay.

Kaia still felt as if her heart was being squeezed inside of her chest. She had been hurt and she hated that. She almost wasn’t prepared for how intensely angry the idea of Claire being hurt made her.

Claire’s head moved to the side and her eyes began to flutter open. Kaia stood where she was, frozen, until Jody put a hand on her shoulder.

“You should go in.”

Kaia swallowed and for a moment she felt like begging Jody not to make her, because she despite it all, her doubts were still making her steps heavy. How was this any harder than escaping from the Lizards, than surviving in a hostile world that wanted her dead without hesitation?

It wasn’t. But if Claire hadn’t really missed her as much as everyone had told her, that would be a completely different kind of devastation.

She still made herself open the room’s door. She hesitantly took a few steps forwards.

Claire was still in the process of waking up. Her blue eyes were bright and unfocused. Her face turned towards her and scrunched up in a gesture of confusion.

“Oh,” she muttered. “This dream again…”

She immediately closed her eyes again and turned her head. Kaia’s heart was beating in her throat. She had no idea what to say to her. Her mind was completely blank and overwhelmed with emotions that were threatening to spill from her eyes.

So the only thing she could manage to croak was:

“Claire.”

Claire opened her eyes and looked at her again. Her eyebrows shot up and her mouth slacked open.

“Kaia?”

Kaia couldn’t speak anymore. The back of her throat ached with all the words stuck there and her tongue was a knot in her mouth. She blinked trying to get the tears away as a smile spread across Claire’s lips.

“She really did it,” she said, with fascination. “She brought you home.”

Kaia nodded.

Claire stretched her good arms towards her and when Kaia moved towards her this time, when she sat at the edge of the bed as close as she dared to, her doubts weren’t paralyzing her anymore. She had been a fool for having them in the first place.

She let Claire put an arm around her shoulders, snuggled against her neck, and cried.


	6. Chapter 6

There was a certain cycle that followed just after coming home from a hunt. Claire always needed to unwind right after a hunt. She needed to process what had happened to her and what she could’ve done better, wait until the most recent batch of nightmares went away. It helped being there, of course, it helped to have her family around her.

Sometimes she felt good enough to work a part time job at the cop bar where Jody and other people from the sheriff office hanged out, or as a waitress in the local diner. The people of Sioux Fall knew her as Jody’s nomadic adopted daughter and they probably think she did drugs and that was why she disappeared for weeks at a time without a warning. They were kind enough, though, and Claire made enough money that she could afford a couple of full gas tanks, a cheap hotel bedroom by the road and some ammo. Sam had taught her how to run credit card scams, but Jody preferred she didn’t, so Claire tried to get as much as she could in the intervals between cases.

That was always an unspoken topic in Jody’s home. They sat around the dinner table, she heard about Alex’s job, about Patience’s exams, about Jody arresting the town’s drunk again. Donna sometimes showed up and regaled them with the tale of how she had shot a moose or something like that. For a couple of days, it felt like the supernatural couldn’t touch them and Claire enjoyed those moments, she really did. Many times she wished they would last longer than they did.

But, of course, something always ended up happening. Patience had a vision. Some terrified teenagers who had been making out on the road outside of town came to Jody to tell her they had seen a weird dude with a lizard mask. Alex read an article about a weird death in the next state over. Donna called for back-up.

And if nothing like that happened, Claire just started getting anxious. For most folks, no news would be good news, but to her, silence and inactivity were maddening. Yes, she needed intervals of peace and quiet between hunts, but after a while, the house started seeing too small. Alex and Patience were up in her business, Jody was overly concerned.

She couldn’t stop dreaming about her father. Her mother. Kaia.

And so, off she went again. Because standing still for too long was also a surefire way for her nightmares to catch up to her.

This time the cycle felt different. First of all, it had been a while since she had been this badly hurt during a hunt. The claw marks in her stomach and chest were going to become her biggest and ugliest scars, and her dislocated shoulder was stubbornly refusing to heal as fast as Claire wanted. On top of that, she wasn’t sure what the Shtriga had done when it’d tried to suck her “life force” out, but it made her sick. Like, fever, shivers, couldn’t stop coughing, could barely get out of bed sick. Alexis said it was a mild pneumonia and yeah, maybe it was. But the cause of it wasn’t that simple.

Claire hated every second she had to stay in bed and “just rest”. She tried watching Netflix, but her fever made her fall asleep in the middle of the shows, so she always missed out what she was supposed to be finding so fascinating and interesting according to Patience. And besides… falling asleep all the time meant she had less time to spend with Kaia.

She had taken it up upon herself to be her caretaker while she recovered and Claire tried not to make much of it. Kaia needed time to heal too, to recover from whatever had happened to her in the Bad Place (she didn’t talk about it and Claire didn’t want to push). Alex, Patience and Jody were all busy with their actual jobs and lives and studies, and though Donna stuck around for a few days, she also had to go back to Minnesota eventually.

“These trips are getting a little bit tiresome,” she’d commented. “Maybe I could find a place that isn’t so far away from you, girls.”

“I’m sure Jody would love that,” Claire had told her.

Donna smiled at her and patted her on the good shoulder before standing up to give Kaia a quick hug.

“Take care of her, will you?” she said, low enough that Claire supposed she wasn’t supposed to hear it.

And Kaia did. She served Claire the meals and helped her maneuver the spoon or the fork so she could eat. She put fresh cloths on her forehead to cool down her fever. She brought her ice to put on her shoulder and made sure she was taking all of her meds.

“You really don’t have to do all of this, you know?”

“I don’t mind,” Kaia assured her every time Claire protested to her spending all her time making sure she was okay. She even smiled as she said it sometimes, a genuine smile that only sometimes spread to her eyes. “You would do the same for me.”

That was absolutely true and Claire wanted to. Even in her pathetic, sickly state, she wanted to do what she could for Kaia, but every time she asked, Kaia insisted that she was doing okay, that she was just glad to be back, that Claire needed to focus on getting herself better.

Once or twice, though, she let the mask slip.

Claire had fallen into another of her feverish slumbers one night when she woke suddenly to someone screaming. She instinctively kicked off the covers, grabbed the knife she kept under her pillow and jumped out of bed, because it didn’t matter if she only had one good arm and her entire body felt like it had been trampled by a pack of elephants: a scream meant someone was in trouble and she needed to help.

When the second scream came, though, she realized it was coming from the sleeping figure in the chair by her side. Kaia was thrashing and moaning in dreams, a distressed expression on her face. Her dark curls were a mess upon her face and she was sweating heavily.

Claire stopped, not sure what to do at first, but she couldn’t… she couldn’t just let Kaia keep suffering like that.

“Kaia,” she said, grabbing her by the shoulder gently. Kaia’s body convulsed like she was trying to get out of Claire’s grip, so she held her tighter and shook her a bit. “Kaia! Wake up!”

Kaia opened her eyes. They looked big and terrified and she seemed lost for a moment as she looked around the room, shaking slightly. Then she broke down crying.

And at that point, there wasn’t much Claire could do but hold her and reassure her that it was okay. That it was going to be okay. They were there, they were home, together. They were safe. She was safe and she never had to think about the Bad Place again.

Of course, she knew it wasn’t going to be as easy as all that.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Not really, no.”

Kaia avoided her gaze and kept eating her scrambled eggs from her lap. Claire’s coffee tasted bitter on her tongue.

“Kaia…”

“I’ve always have nightmares. This is nothing new,” Kaia said. She took in a deep, shaky breath. “I just… I don’t know why it’s affecting me so much this time.”

“Maybe because you’ve actually been there,” Claire pointed out. “You’ve actually lived in your nightmare for the last two years.”

They had already talked about it. Claire had begged her to forgive her for leaving her there and Kaia had assured her, over and over, that it hadn’t been her fault, that she couldn’t have known. It had done very little to assuage Claire’s guilt, though. As soon as she was healed and back on her feet, she was going to her damnest to make sure nothing ever happened to her again.

Kaia shook her head.

“This is different. When I was there, the last few days… there was something different,” Kaia explained. “The Lizards were scared, they were scampering instead of attacking. The weather was all sorts of messed up. It wasn’t the storm season, but it seemed like it rained every other day. And not just light rain, I mean lightning storms, almost hurricanes. The guys said…”

She stopped and looked down at her lap again.

“What? What did they say?” Claire asked.

Kaia swallowed.

“They said that world is dying. That’s what the Other Kaia told them. She thinks those storms… that they were going to bring the end of it.”

Claire pursed her lips. She hadn’t forgiven herself for abandoning Kaia, which meant she certainly wasn’t anywhere close to forgiving the Other Kaia. However…

“She knew it was the end of her world and she still went back there?”

“She… didn’t think it was right. To let me die in her place,” Kaia said. She shook her head. “Don’t ask me how I know it. It’s like in this time, our connection has become… stronger. I can see what she thinks, know what she knows. It’s how I survived. I knew everything she did about that world once I started paying attention to our dreams.”

“Well, she trapped you there to begin with,” Claire said, through gritted teeth. “So, I’m not exactly fond of her.”

“I know…” Kaia said, cringing slightly.

Claire stretched her hand over the edge of the bed and put on Kaia’s forearm. She waited until Kaia raised her eyes to continue speaking:

“But, in a weird way, I know she means a lot to you,” she added. “So of course the dreams are making you upset now. She’s… dying, isn’t she?”

Kaia swallowed. Her eyes were bloodshot with tears she didn’t quite dare to let flow freely and Claire didn’t want that. She wanted her to feel like she could cry, like she could tell her or show her anything she was feeling.

“Kaia?”

“She’s not dying yet,” Kaia explained. “She’s… fighting, travelling. She knows there are other humans there or at least that there were at some point, because she had to be born from someone, right? She’s trying to find them. So when the end comes she’ll be among her own instead of among monsters.”

“She wants to die in her own terms,” Claire understood.

Kaia nodded.

And despite how angry she was, Claire could respect that.

***

By the end of the third week, Claire felt like her lungs weren’t filled with water anymore. Alex listened to her breathing with a stethoscope and declared her pneumonia-free. Her shoulder was also finally off the sling, though Alex recommended her not to do “anything crazy” with it for at least another month. She meant not to go hunting, of course, and though normally by this point in the cycle Claire would be itching to punch a ghost or something, she felt inclined to obey.

If only because still didn’t seem like she was ready to… she really didn’t know what Kaia was going to do now.

“Derek said there were other dreamwalkers. Elders, that could teach me how to better control it, how to see… things other than alternate worlds, you know?” she told Claire at one point. “Maybe I should go find them.”

“Yeah, that’s a great idea,” Jody said.

“Maybe we can give Patience’s Sight a break,” Alex suggested.

“I’m not sure that’s how that works,” Kaia said, with a laugh. “But maybe.”

Claire didn’t say anything, but in the back of her mind, she had already decided that other hunters could take care of whatever monsters were roaming the Midwest those days. She was going to leave when Kaia did, follow her wherever she goes.

But not yet. It seemed like Kaia wouldn’t leave until the Other Kaia was done with her journey. She would give updates to Claire about it: she had come out of the jungle where she (and Kaia) had lived her entire life. She was trying to find a way to cross a wild river, made even wilder by the storms. She was scavenging for food. She had almost drowned in another river. She was camping by a cliff. She had found marks in trees and traces on the ground and she needed to follow them before the now near constant rain wiped them out.

Since Claire had recovered and didn’t need someone bringing her pain meds and cool cloths in the middle of the night, Kaia had taken to sleeping in the pullout couch in the living room instead of a sleeping bag in the floor of Claire’s room. Claire had tried not to be hurt when she rejected her offer to switch, to take turns, so they could still share a room despite them not technically needing to anymore.

“It’s okay,” Kaia had assured her. “I don’t really need a bed. The couch is comfortable enough.”

Her smile had melted Claire’s heart.

She hadn’t said anything about her feelings. Kaia was overwhelmed, adjusting, going through a lot. It wouldn’t be fair to just dump everything Claire had been holding onto for two years on her. However, there were times where she thought that Kaia knew regardless. Times where they had sat in silence while eating together and she looked up and Kaia just offered her the softest smile. Or times where they were watching TV together and they sat a little too close and Kaia let Claire put an arm around her shoulders.

She liked that. It reminded her that not everything was doom and gloom all of the time and there were times when they could be together and not think about monsters or worlds ending or the Other Kaia. Everything else she had to say to Kaia, well… that could wait until she was ready to hear it.

* * *

The Other Kaia died on a Thursday morning.

Claire woke up to a soft knock on the door. She gripped the knife under her pillow for a second before she remembered she was in Jody’s home and had nothing to fear. She got up and opened to find Kaia standing on her doorway, with tears streaming down her cheeks.

“She’s… she’s gone…” she managed to mutter.

And Claire didn’t need to know what she meant. She just pulled her in for the tightest hug she had given her so far.

Kaia didn’t want to go back to sleep, afraid that she might feel the Other Kaia’s death again, so Claire pulled a blanket from her bed and they went downstairs, treading lightly so their steps wouldn’t wake Jody and the others up. They sat on the porch steps and Claire wrapped them both in the blanket. There was a faint light in the horizon, a spring dawn breaking slowly, making the darkness around them grey and soothing.

Kaia cried some more with her face on Claire’s shoulder and then she began telling her of the last moments of her doppelganger.

“She found them. Another tribe of travelers, of humans she had never seen before. They spoke a different language than her, but they understood each other. They were trekking for higher ground, because all the rivers had flooded and the ravines and the cliffs were full of water. She came with them. They found a cave, on the side of a mountain. They made a fire and they sang songs while the never-ending storm raged outside. The water rose and rose and when it started filling up their cave, they knew there was nowhere else they could run. So they held hands and kept singing. She didn’t know the words but she followed along with the melody and then… then she was drowning, the water going into her nose, into her lungs… the last thing she thought was that the water, it… it tasted good. It tasted pure.”

Kaia’s voice broke down and she cried again, while Claire rub her hand up and down her arm, not sure what to even answer to that.

“My entire life,” Kaia said, after a while. “I have been connected to her, to that place, my entire life. I hated it. I feared it. But now it’s gone and it’s like I’ve lost an arm or a leg. It’s like a part of me has been… taken.”

“I’m sorry,” Claire said, and it felt like trying to stop the flood with a single branch thrown in the river. It was pathetic. But what else could she really say?

“I thought if I never had to go back there again, when I slept, I would feel… relieved. But I just… I’m just sad. As horrible as it was, it was… a place. There were so many monsters there, but also humans that survived and…” Kaia shook her head. “It doesn’t seem fair that it’s gone.”

“Are you sure it’s gone?” Claire wanted to know. “That there’s nothing there left at all?”

“Nothing but the water.”

A deluge. It sounded almost biblical.

The sky was no longer dark, but had taken on orange and red hues. Claire put both her hands on Kaia’s cheeks and slowly raised her head so she would look at her.

“But you’re free, though,” she told her. “You can see other places now. You don’t have to be scared anymore. You’re home. We’re all here for you.” She made a pause before she added: “I’m here. For whatever you need.”

Despite her tears, Kaia’s lips curved in the shadow of a smile. She snuggled closer to Claire and she just held her, held her while the pinkish light of the dawn turned golden and warm over their skins.

“Will you come with me?” Kaia asked her, in a whisper. “When I leave to look for the Elders, for a new teacher. Would you…?”

“Of course,” Claire assured her. “The moment you’re ready to leave, we leave. You just have to say the word.”

Kaia let out a sigh, shaky and broken. But there was the relief Claire had been expecting.

“Okay,” she said. She moved away to look at Claire in the eyes. “But… can we stay here a little longer?”

Claire didn’t know if she meant that they should stay there in the porch until the sun was entirely up or if she was talking about Jody’s house. Their home. With their family.

Either was fine with her.

“Yeah. We can stay as long as you want.”


End file.
